ii4 ROBERT BROWN 



methods already alluded to), and one cannot withhold admira- 

 tion at the energy and the learning of its author. It is a 

 wonderful tribute to his wisdom that his descriptions and 

 arrangements should have so stood the test of 100 years, during 

 which time vast strides in our knowledge of the Australian and 

 other floras have been made. But the lapse of time has resulted 

 in scarcely any but trifling modifications of the general results 

 as he left them. The Prodromus is well worth study, for in its 

 pages one constantly meets with hints of observations which 

 have borne fruit in later years. Some of them, indeed, e.g. 

 his observations on Cycads, were expanded by himself into 

 larger treatises in which much light has been thrown on morpho- 

 logical and taxonomic relationships previously but imperfectly 

 understood. 



The year before the publication of the Prodromus, Brown 

 communicated to the Linnean Society an excellent and learned 

 memoir on the Proteaceae. In this paper we encounter an 

 instance of that whimsical introduction of observations exceed- 

 ingly valuable in themselves, but mainly irrelevant to the matter 

 in hand, which is a characteristic feature of many of his works. 

 Perhaps it was due to the intense keenness with which he always 

 followed up problems that interested him, so that, like Mr Dick's 

 weakness for King Charles' head, they had to find a place in 

 whatever else he was writing about. Thus his treatise on the 

 Proteaceae starts off with advice to study the flower in the 

 young, instead of only in its adult condition, and this is driven 

 home by an excellent disquisition on the structure of the an- 

 droecium and gynaeceum of Asclepiads, a subject which occupied 

 his mind for some years and formed the basis for separate papers 

 at subsequent periods. Only when he has discussed the morph- 

 ology of the Asclepiad flower does he plunge, abruptly, into the 

 questions relating directly to the Proteaceae. 



Later on in the same year (1809) he read a masterly paper 

 on the Asclepiadaceae which was subsequently printed in the 

 Memoirs of the Wernerian Natural History Society. This 

 Natural Order was here separated by him from the Apocynaceae, 

 from which it had not previously been distinguished, and a cor- 

 rect account of the relations of the remarkable androecium, so 



